Dave Rubin hosts a roundtable with David Reaboi, John Cardillo, and Karol Markowitz discussing their relocations to Florida from New York and D.C. to escape perceived dystopian governance and lockdowns. The panel critiques rising housing costs pricing out minorities yet praises Governor Ron DeSantis for opposing federal mandates and enacting school bills restricting gender identity discussions in primary grades. While Cardillo and Markowitz urge DeSantis to run for president in 2024 to drain the swamp, Reaboi doubts Washington's capacity for conservative reform. Ultimately, the episode highlights Florida as a sanctuary for free speech and authentic community living against federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
We are live on Rumble on YouTube and on Blaze TV, and welcome to our first roundtable of 2022.
Feeling very sharp today because we're doing a Florida Spectacular.
That's right, we're going to be discussing why the free state of Florida is just so absolutely Wonderful.
My linen suit is getting dry-cleaned, as you can imagine, so this is my second best Miami outfit.
Joining me is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, David Reboy, political commentator John Cardillo, and New York Post and Fox News columnist Carol Markowitz.
David, John, Carol, Floridians, welcome to The Rubin Report.
Great to be here.
It is good to see you guys.
We are all Floridians in different parts of Florida.
Here, I'll take the sunglasses off now that I made my point.
I am here on the beach.
This is obviously completely real.
John, I want to start with you because you've been here the longest.
You are a New York guy originally, just like me.
You were in the NYPD.
You lived that Northeast life.
You came down here.
What, it's about 18 years ago.
I guess what sent you down here originally, and how's it been for these last 18 years?
And so, yeah, so I got here, two weeks will be 18 years.
And I got here February 23rd, 2004.
For me, it was a little bit different.
It wasn't this mass migration we're seeing now with the politics and lockdowns.
I just got sick of that general malaise that was over in New York City post 9-11.
You know, Bloomberg was mayor, he started to regulate fruit punch, so you can kind of see the end of poaching.
But I also didn't want to live and die in the same place my whole life.
I grew up in Queens, on the top of the Bronx, in Manhattan, and I just wanted a change and fell in love with South Florida, and here I am, 18 years later.
has always been a great place to visit, and it was an okay place to live.
But around 2018, I started coming down here to Miami Beach, and my family lives down here for the last 20 years.
And I kind of grew up around here, around this neighborhood, because my grandparents lived here as well, so we used to come down and visit.
In 2018 I started coming down with more frequency and realizing that I hated it every time I had to go back So I just said, you know what the heck with it.
I'm gonna I'm just gonna move to Florida and when I did I was You know, I was kind of alone You know people were like, why are you moving to Florida?
You're gonna be completely disconnected from from life and And it was fine.
It was great until COVID came along and then when COVID came along, everybody started to see what, you know, what a great place Florida is.
And now, you know, now I feel like it's over because we've been completely, you know, overtaken.
I mean, you know, no offense to you guys, but we've been Completely overtaken by new residents filling up.
I want to address that, actually, because I think it's a really important thing to talk about, about, you know, when you do something right and then you get new people fleeing to make sure that they don't change it.
So I do want to get to that.
And Reboy, I know you're really not happy about the Miami traffic, so let's hold that for just a sec.
Carol, you just got here, I think basically like the same week that I got here.
I bumped into you at the airport, actually, when we were going to something a little north You left Brooklyn.
And, you know, kind of the joke also is that when my husband and I would talk about, like, if we had to leave New York, and this is, you know, five years ago or so, like, if we had to leave New York, where would we go?
So yeah you know around summer 2020 we started talking about like how crazy everything was getting and how we might have to go.
My husband and I are both immigrants so it's sort of been part of our family story that when things get bad you you have to bounce and we saw things getting bad and we saw that our kids weren't going to have the life that we had envisioned for them.
We had just finished like building our dream house.
We were Completely committed to staying in Brooklyn until the kids went to college.
We were going to retire to Manhattan.
We had a whole plan.
But things just got crazier and crazier.
And Florida was so clearly the normal promised land.
I mean, that's really what Florida has become to people.
Yeah, and, you know, I so feel you on that because, first off, I was born in Brooklyn.
I spent most of my life in New York City.
But on the Dreamhouse thing, we had just moved into our Dreamhouse.
I could have never left that place.
Boy, you'd been there.
It was pretty awesome.
And it's at some point, it's time to get out of Dodge.
But I want to address what David said about this sort of new influx and everything.
So, John, you've been here, as I said, 18 years.
You were early in.
Are there negatives to having this new crew move in?
I mean, I've met a ton of people who fully get it, including Carol, like the new people who are coming, who are like, we're here to keep Florida, Florida, et cetera.
But it does create some problems in terms of house prices, traffic, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, as a guy that just bought a house, I can tell you if you had a house here before, you're doing pretty well.
Dave, but I know you've been sort of making a stink about the traffic situation.
It's kind of funny for me coming from LA where the traffic is horrible and you can't even tell where people are going.
Here, it's like they're constructing new roads everywhere.
You can see it's a city that is being born again, but I do have sympathy for the people that have been here, and then it suddenly gets really congested.
I've been kind of watching it over the last two years, especially since COVID.
Trips that would take, I mean, when there's no traffic, I go to one of my gyms in eight minutes.
These days, it can take up to about an hour.
And I've seen it steadily increase.
And yes, I live on the beach, so that makes it hard.
There are only a limited number of places where you can go to get off the beach.
But still, it's just an amazing amount of congestion.
I mean, in addition to the traffic, of course, as you noted, there's the housing prices.
Which are pushing everyone who is middle class further and further out, you know, to the point where it's just, um, I think it's just increasingly going to be not sustainable.
Um, Miami itself is an interesting case because, uh, you know, the, the, the white flight from Miami happened in the eighties and the early nineties.
So that's not, it's not even an issue of that.
I mean, right now, it's, you know, it's it's Cubans and Hispanics that are getting priced out of, you know, of of really anywhere in in almost anywhere in Dade County.
And it's just it's we're going to have to figure out, you know, those of us on the right who believe in, you know, free markets and things like that need to wrap our heads around gentrification and urbanism.
Because we haven't really figured this out in a way that is sustainable.
I mean, we don't want what happened to Austin, what happened to San Francisco, what happened to New York to happen to Miami.
Yeah, and that's actually exactly why I brought it up, because I do think that with all of us new people coming, as wonderful as it is, we do have to be sensitive to the people that got it right and have been here.
And I do sense that, not only through DeSantis, obviously, but But Suarez and some of the other mayors that they are going to hopefully deal with as many of these things.
But I do want to call attention to it.
Carol, has anything been a problem for you here?
People keep asking me in all my Q&As, Dave, it can't just be as great as you say it is.
So sort of my running joke has been, like, the sushi's bad here.
But we've actually had, like, two incredible sushi meals recently, which are New York quality, and I was very impressed.
And I don't even have that anymore to, like, fall back on.
I guess Chinese food.
They still need to kind of work on Chinese food here.
But other than that, like, I can't think of anything.
I mentioned this, I mean, I think to some of you, but Florida schools have a really bad reputation outside of Florida and I don't understand why.
I'm finishing up a book right now but I'm gonna take a deep dive into that at some point because I don't get it.
The public schools that my kids go to in Florida are so good and so responsive and so catering to their Extremely unique needs like I have one child who's just extremely advanced and another child is sort of behind And I have another child who just like has really esoteric interests and they're like really tailoring everything to each one of them individually and I'm extremely impressed and I don't get what I'm missing and maybe it's just like oh my kids have been to good schools here or
That's definitely possible but I think that I really would love to learn more about why Florida schools sort of do have a poor reputation.
I think it's partly because the taxes are low here so people automatically think that means there isn't enough money to go to the schools and it simply is not true where I'm in the suburbs over here where everyone keeps telling us how great all the schools are.
So all right we've whittled it down that the big problems here are there's a little bit of traffic and a salmon avocado roll.
Could be hard to come by, so I think it's doing alright.
But obviously all of this has a little something to do with the guy that's been in charge for the last couple years.
We all had the pleasure of having dinner at the Governor's Mansion with Ron DeSantis about a month and a half ago.
Totally open, it was an off-the-record conversation, so we're not going to repeat anything that was said, but just struck me as just like a really, really decent guy who does not want to be king.
That was my main takeaway of the night.
Like, he does not want to rule over people.
He'd like people to be free.
We could have pulled a gajillion clips of him doing it right over the last two years.
We've got this one on children and masks and mandates.
These kids are so much happier being able to go to school without having to wear masks for eight hours a day.
So when you start to see them kind of reevaluate or say all this, just understand this.
The science didn't change.
Well, the medical science didn't change.
The political science changed.
They feel the heat.
They know that voters have been tired of perpetual lockdown policies.
They know that they have basically offered no off-ramp.
And they know that they're fixing to get whooped at the polls.
And so that's what's causing the epiphany.
But the fact of the matter is, if they had looked at the actual science from the beginning, they would have known that this was something that Florida was right on.
Carol, let me start with you on that one because you basically moved here for your kids as we talked about a second ago.
Can you just talk about, you know, having them out of the masks, be free, just their general state.
I read a study yesterday or the day before about the speech issues that kids are now having because literally their mouth muscles are not developing the way they are supposed to and they can't see the teacher's mouths so they can't mimic things and it's going to delay speech for years.
It's just like anybody who's ever met a child knew that was gonna happen.
Like, I don't understand how that's even, like, news, you know?
But so many people were ringing that alarm for so long, and we were obviously all dismissed.
But, you know, about the governor, like, I feel very defensive of him.
I do get into, like, arguments all the time on his behalf.
And it is not because I like him as a politician, although, yes, I do.
It's because I feel like he stands up for literally me, like, for me, for my family.
I feel like he's actually in the fight to help us specifically.
I really can't think of a situation where I felt that way before.
The only even comparable thing to me is how much I credited Rudy Giuliani with turning New York City around and how I felt like that made a real tangible difference in my life, that I could ride the subway at night or any number of things.
The only time in my life where I think a politician has had such a direct effect on what happens in my life and on behalf of my children, that I just feel like I have to constantly go to bat for him because he's protecting me, and I think I owe him the same kind of protection.
John, when we were talking to him, and again, we can't say anything that was private, not that we said - I haven't said anything that shouldn't have been said
publicly, but that was just the nature of the dinner.
The thing that really struck me was how he kind of was just like, yeah, I just didn't feel that I should listen
to group think and I should do what I thought was right.
Like that's kind of how I want to lead.
That in essence was it.
Like that's pretty freaking special these days, huh?
I've always said, the next Republican president that comes in, the next conservative, should find a pool of people who hate DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA.
And whoever in that pool hates those agencies the most, there's your secretary, there's your director.
And I think a guy like DeSantis hates bureaucracy.
I've been around his team and him for many years operating politically down here in Florida.
And they aren't just apolitical, they're anti-political.
In fact, I had a conversation that night with his chief of staff, and it's something he said very publicly about Ron DeSantis isn't beholden to polls.
He doesn't make decisions based on polling.
He makes them based on science and what's best for the people of the state of Florida, his constituents, or when he was a congressman, his congressional district.
Dave, you've been- I think it's, I think it's interesting that four of us now lived in, you know, all four of us here lived in New York City under Giuliani.
And all of us, you know, are obviously here under DeSantis and that parallel that Carol and John mentioned was absolutely apt.
You know, there's no better you know, there's no better analog for it
in American politics, certainly not, you know, in any city, you know, where I--
He does more good here, especially considering what has happened
the last, you know, let's say what's what's happened in the last decade.
Um, to prove that what happens in Washington is, is, you know, frankly unchangeable, you know, the administrative state, the character of our regime, uh, has changed to the point where the administrative state runs the show.
And I don't really think it's possible to, uh, you know, to, to make fundamental change.
Uh, while, while in Washington, I think that that door is, is closed, but here in Florida, as you said, there's a lot that you can do now.
I, you know, Ron DeSantis, I think has done everything right.
He is, he has served also as a beacon for other red state, uh, uh, governors, especially to look around and say, this is, these are the things that are possible.
And I think.
I think definitely after he emerges from his reelection victorious, I think people are going to say, OK, you know, this is a path that is sort of worth taking, which is, you know, which is to sort of model themselves after him and the way he's governing in Florida.
I mean, I think that could be the best case scenario, is having a bunch of really good governors in red states Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, you know, the thing is that I have changed my mind since becoming a Florida resident, which is I, Before moving here, I was like, DeSantis 2024 for sure.
And now, obviously, I see the benefit of having him as my governor.
But I kind of, you know, I agree with so many things that both John and Dave said and you, that, for example, you can't do very much in D.C.
I fully agree with that, but I kind of want to see what a Ron DeSantis, somebody who I feel like is actually effective.
Again, going back to like, I don't think we've had that many effective politicians like ever in any state.
So having an effective politician as president, like, I don't know, what would that be like?
That's exciting.
And the thing is, while I agree that he's young, I think everybody has their moment and we can call this the Chris Christie rule.
And if you don't seize your moment, you might miss it.
Dave, are you as bullish on that idea, or do you just think the machinery in Washington, no matter how effective and clever and, you know, bringing in all the right people, DeSantis does all that stuff, has the right ideas, that just the machinery in Washington just wouldn't allow it to happen, regardless?
Instead of making growing up harder for young people, POTUS is focused on keeping schools open and supporting students' mental health.
Now, what this is referring to is this bill that is being pushed by DeSantis that they're trying to get some of this gender lunacy Out of the schools.
This has nothing to do with you can't say gay.
This has nothing to do with not treating anyone equally under the law or anything else.
But Brad Palumbo, who's been on the show and is a writer for Washington Examiner, he unpacked it a little more cleanly that he tells us about the bill.
It simply prohibits a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.
The proposed law also specifies encouragement of discussion on these topics that cannot be done in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.
Importantly, this bill does not prohibit students from having these discussions on their own initiative.
Discussions of sexuality and gender identity simply can't be forced by the schools.
Now, of course, the White House put our gay transportation secretary, Pete There's a Buttigieg out there to say how homophobic this whole thing is.
Everyone's running around saying DeSantis hates gay people, all the usual nonsense, but literally this is just about are we going to indoctrinate these kids in third, fourth grade about issues that let them talk about it in eighth, ninth grade perhaps, or leave that to the parents, or homeschool, or whatever else.
John, I suppose this doesn't surprise you when they try to pass something that's to stop lunacy, that they get called the bigots and the rest of it?
I mean, look, they'll try to sell you this White House and the corporate media that Pete Buttigieg is the first Senate-confirmed gay cabinet-level appointee.
That's not true.
It was Rick Grenell as acting DNI ambassador to Germany.
Very good friend of mine and yours, Dave.
unidentified
Dave, history, leftist history, corporate media history, has bypassed Rick Grenell.
So, you know, it's funny, and I know that you three know this,
but I'm sort of the squish in the room on trans stuff.
I think conservatives aren't really handling it the way that I would prefer.
Maybe that's a different conversation.
But I think if you read this bill, it's specifically about grade school.
And I think that, you know, I got all these comments on Twitter when I pointed out that the media was following, obviously, the don't say gay labeling of the leftist groups.
The media literally runs that in the headlines.
I got all these comments being like, A high school gay student can't say that they're gay.
You know, it's like people do not understand what it's about at all.
I had a mom in Staten Island in Brooklyn, which is a conservative part, I'm sorry, Staten Island in New York, a conservative part of New York, where her second grader, they read this book called, you know, Is an Avocado a Fruit or a Vegetable?
And it led to this whole discussion about, like, can you change your gender?
It's second grade!
Like, a second grader is extremely susceptible to outside opinion.
I think we really don't realize that small kids really do pick up a lot from their teachers.
I read this bill.
It's really short.
Everybody should read it.
I don't understand where in this bill it says you can't say gay.
It's about not discussing sexual orientation and straight is also a sexual orientation.
So I don't get where that comes from.
I genuinely don't.
And again, I am the squish on this call.
I have had trans friends in my life.
I think there is such a thing as trans people.
And a lot of it is just, we just don't talk about it the right way.
But for kids, I think there's a bright line, and this bill makes that line bright.
That's exactly what it does and I have no problem with it.
Right, and again, the only reason they're even doing something like this is because these people have pushed all of the gender identity confusion on These kids in the first place.
And just for the record, I have no problem with anyone that's trans.
You can live your life however you want to live, but we can put that aside.
Dave, final thought on all of this, and then I'll let you guys go and get prepared for a big Florida weekend.
I assume you all have awesome things to do, you know, wrestling alligators and things.
From a media perspective, is there anything DeSantis should be doing differently on this kind of stuff?
I mean, I think that people are now seeing that we're dealing with utter depravity
And, you know, I mean, let's just go and say it.
These people are groomers.
The obsession that these activists, these gender activists have with children, you know, at this age, you know, whatever, you know, five through eight and sexualizing them.
I mean, it's completely insane.
I think it's not even debatable what these people are doing and what they'd like to do.
I can't quite end on that note for a Florida show, so I will kick it to each one of you for, if you were to welcome, if there were people that are watching this right now, there's an awful lot of people watching that are thinking about moving to Florida.
I mean, that's what I get messages about more than anything else these days.
What would be your one message to someone that was moving to Florida right now?
John, you've been here the longest, so I'll let you go first.
All right, guys, I'm going to finish up without you, but have a great weekend.
I know we'll all be seeing each other pretty soon.
And Florida, it's just fantastic.
Have a good weekend, guys.
And for everybody else, I'm digging these Florida colors, actually.
Maybe this will be the new Friday, the casual Friday.
I just want to say that I think this week was probably maybe it's not my place to say it exactly but I think in some ways this past week what we did on this show was probably the most rewarding week that I've had in terms of content and messaging and doing what I'm supposed to be doing maybe since really the beginnings of this thing back in like 2015 or something I think what we did With Rumble making the offer to Joe Rogan, defending free speech and not just talking about it, but putting our money where our mouth is.
It's actually irrelevant whether he takes us up on the offer or not.
We put our best foot forward on that.
I think, you know, talking as much as we did about all of this Canadian trucker stuff as they get lambasted in the media and lied about, you know, exposing all of the nonsense at CNN and the way these people lie.
It's like, I think We've got a chance.
I really do think we've got a chance.
And I think Ground Zero for that chance is right here in Florida, which is exactly why I wanted to do our first panel the way we did just now.
So again, it's probably not for me to say that.
It's probably for you guys to say that.
But I hope you have a great weekend.
I hope that you see some of the signs now.
There are signs.
There are signals all over the place.
The truckers did something in Canada, not because they're transphobes and racists, but because they wanted to live freely.
And now their country is starting to open up for now, but they probably will have to keep the pressure on.
Not only that, but then it leaked into the United States.
It's not a coincidence that as people saw the people of Canada, Stand up that suddenly our blue state Democrat, you know, governors and authorities were suddenly like, oh, we'll open up to and we'll get the kids out of masks and everything else.
And if you've seen the videos that they're showing now from these schools where the teachers announced the kids are ripping off the mask, you know, you can take off your mask now and they rip them off and they're.
The joy, the sheer exuberance that these kids are showing.
It's incredible.
We will get back to being human, but we'll only do it if we say we're the ones that are going to make it happen.